Multicultural cul de sac

Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdomdocuments the Muslim Student Association at the University of Texas-San Antonio harrassing women and Jews and explains for us how a university with a "hate speech" policy allows this to go on. It's twisted, but this is the cul de sac the universities have put themselves in.

I'm interested to hear what the diversity czars and the risk-averse university bureaucrats have to say about this kind of identitarian political activism - not because I'm particularly bothered by it (the video shows the MSA for the repressive ideologues and wannabe zealous thugs they are, and frankly, I find it refreshing to see such free speech aired on a university campus for a change) - but rather because a university-sanctioned group is performing such confrontational activism on a university campus, where "hate" is purportedly disallowed.

This puts diversity advocates and university administrators in quite a bind, I should think. Because to "tolerate" the political activism of the MSA, the university must simultaneously allow for "hatred" against women and Jews (the latter not really much of a problem, of course - provided the wretched Zionists don't threaten to sue). Unless, that is, one is able to alter what constitutes "hate" by simultaneously altering the feminist narrative to conclude that Muslim women who "Americanize" are somehow traitors to their own cultural foundationalism, and so shouldn't be granted the protections of American women who are treated as kitchen and laundry room chattel. Which argument, here, would manifest itself with nothing much more than a deafening silence from the Women's Studies Department.

Sadly, none of this anti-intellectual two-stepping is at all implausible (or even unlikely) - particularly when one is forced by one's progressivism to navigate through the minefield that identity politics and multiculturalism combine to create once protected groups become pitted against one another.

Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdomdocuments the Muslim Student Association at the University of Texas-San Antonio harrassing women and Jews and explains for us how a university with a "hate speech" policy allows this to go on. It's twisted, but this is the cul de sac the universities have put themselves in.

I'm interested to hear what the diversity czars and the risk-averse university bureaucrats have to say about this kind of identitarian political activism - not because I'm particularly bothered by it (the video shows the MSA for the repressive ideologues and wannabe zealous thugs they are, and frankly, I find it refreshing to see such free speech aired on a university campus for a change) - but rather because a university-sanctioned group is performing such confrontational activism on a university campus, where "hate" is purportedly disallowed.

This puts diversity advocates and university administrators in quite a bind, I should think. Because to "tolerate" the political activism of the MSA, the university must simultaneously allow for "hatred" against women and Jews (the latter not really much of a problem, of course - provided the wretched Zionists don't threaten to sue). Unless, that is, one is able to alter what constitutes "hate" by simultaneously altering the feminist narrative to conclude that Muslim women who "Americanize" are somehow traitors to their own cultural foundationalism, and so shouldn't be granted the protections of American women who are treated as kitchen and laundry room chattel. Which argument, here, would manifest itself with nothing much more than a deafening silence from the Women's Studies Department.

Sadly, none of this anti-intellectual two-stepping is at all implausible (or even unlikely) - particularly when one is forced by one's progressivism to navigate through the minefield that identity politics and multiculturalism combine to create once protected groups become pitted against one another.